More Details

Business Information

Timeline & Time Frame

If you're reading this - you've been sent this as an early adopter - and we're really interested in working with you to get your content into our platforms, however we should probably note that we're still in early days - launching a new user generated content program does take some time; and we're still in the process of testing what works best for everyone.

We are specifically looking for early adopters, who can work with us to make this the best platform for building content on. There is big advantages for getting in on 'Day 1', and we'll be happy to discuss those directly with you.

We do have some fixed content supplier agreements right now, but we're not posting those publicly just because we likely will adjust terms based on feedback. That said, there's a lot more details about them below.

So here's what we've got already:

A new virtual world platform that brings some really much-needed features (like a decent graphics engine, good tools integration, and a ton more.)

A ton of users (because of the way we're set-up, we've got 2.5 million accounts across our worlds, which you'll be able to sell to)

A burning desire to make this successful for everyone (we've been working on this since 2009) and no fear of having personal relationships with big content creators (we want to know what you like and don't like).

And here's what's on our plans for the near future:

Please note - we're providing these for informational purposes only (so please don't hang us by them!). Deadlines can slip on individual items, but these are our internal goals for the next 5 months.

UI/UX Improvements (September 2015) - we're working on making our new user experiences more accessible to end users. This also includes moving our web-player from requiring the Unity Plugin, to using WebGL in modern browsers. Particularly, we're focused on chat & social features & UI in the short term.

Updating all our worlds to match the latest code (October 2015) - this'll include new versions of wet.fm, GoJiyo, a new world and 1-2 others. When these are relaunched, we'll enable inter-world teleports and more tightly couple the environments.

Consumer Promotion (December 2015), we'll be aiming for a wider release and marketing activities to users from existing virtual worlds in December 2015 ahead of the holiday season. This will be complemented with increased activity on our existing channels.

API and Programmer SDKs for richer content (Q1 2016). You can already produce an array of 'rich content' from our existing tools, including quests and various other scripted content, however we will be introducing dedicated C# scripting, with both server and client-side scripts available to work with. We may work with professional programmers who wish to provide deeper scripted experiences prior to this SDK release. Contact us if this is you.

Mobile and Tablet experiences (Q1 2016) - we know a full virtual world won't work terribly well on a tablet device; so we're releasing adapted versions for these devices in 2016. These devices are focused on particular niche activities (such as chat/IM, wardrobe functions, etc.) and aim to do just that niche, but do it well.

Revenue Share

Our revenue share is based on net profit, basically the money we receive from our payment processors, after paying all the various fees and taxes. If the user was sent by an affiliate link (e.g. an advertiser), that advertiser may also be given a small cut for sending a spending user our way. The final amount we get, we split 70/30 with you. The contract we offer has more specific details on these.

We do provide you with sales reports and income will be distributed to you once each quarter in USD via bank transfer (we may also be able to arrange PayPal if you ask)

Costs

We won't charge you to sell your content with us - we have no required subscriptions or maintenance fees. If you create your own dedicated region, we'll host and include that for free.

IP Ownership

We don't make any claims over your IP - what we do ask is for a license to be able to host/distribute/resell your content on our services. You fully retain all rights to resell the content you submit in any other location as well (no exclusivity).

Piracy & Copyright Infringement

We intend to always process content through a manual review process, with verified submitters. This means we're likely to catch any pirate submissions, and always have a name on file for who submitted it. If someone rips off your content - we can give you more useful responses (including instant removal from all our platforms).

Content Packaging

Content is uploaded to our servers in a highly compressed & stripped package format, we don't distribute FBXs or other source files to client PCs and all of our files distributed to users are custom engine & platform specific formats. This makes your content difficult to extract back out (and such extraction is always 'lossy' as our compression is not lossless).

Additionally, most of our formats for complex or interactive content are rather unique to our platform, meaning they wouldn't be much use to anyone, given that we don't allow general free-for-all uploads of content.

Brand Management

You retain full rights to use your own brand (we in-fact require it), your brand is featured on items listed in the main store-fronts; you may set-up your own regions for selling your goods; and have features to encourage you to create a cohesive and interesting catalogue of items.

Free Currency & Promotions

We offer the option to sell your content optionally under a promotional currency (we give a whole bunch of this to every user who signs up, and on a regular basis as rewards for games/activities), as a incentive for allowing your content to be bought with this currency, we offer promotional rewards.

Basically, in turn we allow you to spend that promotional currency on buying various promotional offers; such as posts in our newsletter, featured positions in the store-front, Facebook mentions, etc. It is optional if you want to participate (and you can dictate your prices in both currencies separately for individual items), but we want to reward you if you do.

Assistance & Porting Information

We're really keen to make this a 'low risk' enterprise for creators who have large existing content libraries. This means we'll be happy to port existing content for you. We're happy to take a big directory of source files, organise it, port it and prepare it on your behalf. You can do this yourself too.

Maturity Levels & Content Theme

We operate several virtual worlds under this one platform (with accounts & inventory shareable between them), each of these has their own content standards for maturity levels. Content is assessed and given a rating which determines which worlds it will be available in.

Unfortunately, laws and legal jurisdictions for higher maturity level content can be difficult to navigate; so we tend to operate on a "Would MTV be able to get away with showing this?" basis when assessing content (which tends to place our current maximum maturity level somewhere around the upper end of 'MA15+').

Our white label offering is however exempt from these standards, provided that you can comply with appropriate legal regulations.

Further Questions

We're very happy to have a chat with you, generally speaking our agreements tend to go pretty heavily towards the creator, so we're always happy to explain the specifics - feel free to email us if you need to know more - contact@sinewavecompany.com.

Technical Information

Formats & General Info

We take generally any industry standard format - FBX is our preferred format for modelling, but we'll take COLLADA, OBJ and many others. For textures, we can take PSD, TGA, JPEG, PNG and more. We prefer textures are submitted as high as possible - we reduce them depending on the users access method (typically we use 1024/2048 on PC/Desktop, 256/512 on Web, and 256 on mobile.)

We accept several texture maps; depending on the pipeline you are working with, you can submit either:

Standard Rendering Pipeline

Diffuse Color (Optional Transparency in 'A' channel) (required)

Specular Color (Optional Specularity in 'A' channel)

Normal Map (Optional Parallax Depth in 'A' channel)

Emission Color Map (Optional HDR Brightness in 'A' channel)

Reflection Cube Map (intensity modulated by Specular 'A' channel)

Tint Map (R, G, B, A channels each contain a mask for color tinting various portions of the diffuse map) (Customisable Items Only)

Physically Based Rendering Pipeline

Base Color

Specular Color

Metallicity (Grayscale)

Roughness (Grayscale)

Ambient Occlusion (Grayscale)

Transparency (Grayscale)

Emission Color Map (Optional HDR Brightness in 'A' channel)

Tint Map (as per Standard Pipeline)

Custom Rendering Pipeline

We do allow custom rendering pipelines to be submitted using custom shaders.

Shaders must compile on all of our key platform targets. We'll tell you if they don't.

Shaders will be reviewed for performance, generally speaking, we don't want large shader programs (150+ instructions, or multiple passes) on large objects.

We're happier if you re-use a custom shader across a lot of objects, or between multiple creators.

For poly counts - we have some varying numbers depending on what you're doing.

For Avatars, we expect a fully loaded avatar to be around 8,000 to 12,000 polygons at the standard LOD. We optionally support a 'high detail' LOD used when up-close (typically only shown on the users own avatar), this has a target of 25,000 to 40,000 polygons.

Avatar components should be skinned matching our default skeleton (except for bone attachments, which may be unskinned). We provide an automated system to provide skin weight transfer which may be able to automatically skin your items for you (although manual skinning will produce higher quality results).

We also have a "Clothes Porter" that can resize and re-fit content built for any humanoid skeleton and apply it to ours for faster importing of content from existing libraries. (We can also use this when we periodically refine our core skeletons to refit clothing designed for previous versions.)

For regions - we typically ask you aim for around 250,000 polygons; but this is a flexible limit. With application of LOD or Occlusion culling, you can create much bigger regions. (Filesize is a more significant limitation).

For Pets, we expect a typical polycount of around 2,500 +/- 1,000. Vehicles should be around 1,000 to 5,000 polygons, with a much lower collision mesh also supplied.

Polycounts are enforced by our review team - we will generally allow higher poly-count items if they are priced higher than lower poly-count items to limit the number of avatars using them. We do however strongly prefer you use normal & depth maps to simulate fine details, rather than model them.

sinewave.space

Space.com is the website for our virtual world platform. We spent six years building virtual worlds and goods for other people, and then we decided to stop being constrained by budgets and to build the one we always wanted. This is it!